remix my lit

As we said, “at the core of the Creative Commons project is a suite of standardised licences that are made freely available to authors and artists. The licences are designed to provide a range of protections and freedoms for their material. Creative Commons builds upon the “all rights reserved” or traditional copyright to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” system.” But what does it all mean?

There is great concern worldwide that too much copyright material is left inactive in archives (e.g. government, museums) because the process of negotiating the licence is too time consuming or expensive, even where the copyright owner does not want to make money. Now that we have a vast array of digital technology that can present much of this material to the world cheaply and rapidly more and more institutions are considering how they might allow greater access to their archives/knowledge (e.g. BBC). A facility for accessing archived material, especially publicly funded material, will increasingly be demanded as part of the landscape of information management and creative innovation. CC provides an effective and simple way in which sharing and collaborative effort can be facilitated in the realm of digital content and hopefully a way in which inactive copyright material can be given new life.

Creative Commons (CC) is a San Francisco-based international non-profit organisation that aims to promote felxible copyright options for creators. It is the administering body of the Creative Commons licences. Founded by a group of copyright experts—most notably Professor Lawrence Lessig—who wanted to respond to the growing problems of default copyright in the digital environment. In particular they wanted to provide a user-friendly and easy way for people who wanted to make their copyright material more freely available to do so, without needing to hire a lawyer.

Still not sure what it is all about? We’ve got a page on the theory over here and a couple of explanatory videos here.